A Treatise On The Great Art: A System Of Physics According To Hermetic Philosophy And Theory And Practice Of The Magisterium by Antoine-Joseph PernetyEnglish | Sep 10, 1997 | ISBN: 1163483486 | 115 Pages | PDF | 1 MB

Excerpt: … "It is also the cause of the movement of Light which acts on our Ether, and which conus principally and most efficaciously from the sun." …

This remarkable hard-money treatise appeared in 1840. It is by Condy Raguet (1784-1842), a noted Pennsylvania politician and economist who worked as a merchant in several Latin American countries. He was wholly dedicated to free trade, the free market, and especially to sound money and banking. He documents how bank inflation causes booms and busts and articulates, with remarkable prescience, how those cycles in which government does nothing come and go, while those in which government tries to help last and last. His book is a great narrative to read in light of the current cycle of boom and bust. He clearly distinguishes between sound and unsound banking practices, delineated based on their redemption practices. He shows that there is a big difference between good credit based on savings and bad credit based on monetary expansion. He clarifies the role that credit plays in the cause of economic growth: praiseworthy when extended based on good judgment but dangerous when extended with guarantees and recklessness.

In The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster, Werner Troesken looks at a long-running environmental and public health catastrophe: 150 years of lead pipes in local water systems and the associated sickness, premature death, political inaction, and social denial. The harmful effects of lead water pipes became apparent almost as soon as cities the world over began to install them. Doctors and scientists noted cases of acute illness and death attributable to lead in public water beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, and an editorial in the New York Herald called for the city to study the matter after a bizarre illness made headlines in 1868. But officials took no action for many years. New York City, for example, did not take any steps to reduce lead levels in water until 1992, long after the most serious damage had been done. By then, in any case, much of the old lead pipe had been replaced with safer materials.

A complete summary of the views of the most important philosophers in Western civilization. Each major field of philosophic inquiry comprises a separate chapter for greater accessibility. Includes Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Dewey, Sartre, and many others.